Poster Session
The Story of COVID-19 View Digital Media
Poster Session Esther Kentish
COVID-19 has altered the way that we view the future, particularly concerning the future of healthcare and dealing with a global pandemic. This paper discusses the role of doctor narratives, patient narratives, and fiction novels in terms of how the NHS dealt with the overwhelming COVID-19 waves. The paper discusses Wave 1 of COVID-19 and Wave 2 and the differences between the responses. The paper also offers a look into critical medical humanities and examines the course in which we should go in terms of medicine, medical professionals, and patients becoming medical professionals. The paper argues for a role for patient narratives and expresses how stories help us situate historical and situational context into a particular form that connects literary criticism, medicine, science, and English together. The paper outlines facets of COVID-19 from its epistemology and in turn, goes through a breakdown of experiences that the patient has experienced. There are differences in response to COVID-19 by different patients, particularly patients in care homes as opposed to the latter. Further, the way that some of the COVID-19 responses were, showcased and explicated the experiences of various doctors and carers across the UK. The paper poses the question of how the pandemic was handled by health professionals handled. The exigence with these narratives is that they may be missing a particular view from the stance of literary critics to examine what is going on.
Emerging Library Services to Increase the Discoverability, Citeability, and Preservation of Digital Humanities Projects, Publications, and Data View Digital Media
Poster Session Benjamin Saracco
While Digital Humanities (DH) projects and publications have flourished in recent years in terms of both overall quantity and the variety of innovative platforms used to host them, the vast majority of DH projects and publications are not being discovered easily by the broader research community. Recently published data found that 82% of all published humanities articles never get cited at all. (Larivière, 2022) Adoption of FAIR data principles (data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) have not been widely implemented across the field of DH for a variety of technical and broader scholarly publishing barriers. For example, DH projects are frequently hosted using a variety of platforms including WordPress, Omeka, and other proprietary software. Additionally, unlike in the field of health sciences, a publically-owned, gold-standard journal indice such as PubMed does not currently exist for DH publications. Despite these challenges, librarians have created emerging library services meant to help counter the discoverability crisis currently impacting the broader DH field. This poster highlights several innovative services and projects that are aiming to increase the discoverability, citeability, and preservation of DH projects, publications, and data. Innovative projects will be covered that are: minting persistent identifiers such as DOIs to better facilitate the discoverability and citeability of DH projects, indexing DH projects in broad multidisciplinary databases such as Google Scholar with the help of institutional repositories, and ensuring the long-term accessibility of DH projects by utilizing web archiving technology.
Literary Arts in Themes of Animals with a Memory Work and Creative Writing: Considerations and Ideas towards Post-human Education View Digital Media
Poster Session Pirjo Helena Suvilehto
The study focuses on new ideas of post human approaches in education. The objective is in animal contacts and bibliotherapy approach in memory working through creative writing among students in teacher education The relevance is in literary arts practices associated to philosophical and psychological reflections giving perspectives towards post-humanities, also offering a sense of well being. The theoretical background consists of post-human theory of new animal turn and bibliotherapy approach, thus bringing new ideas of, where we stand as humans and non-humans in our educational system. Data consists of students (n=200) recalling their primary memories (2018-2020) related to animal contacts and animal characters in literature. Parts of Pritney Method are developed to realize the project. The paper discusses findings from cases where creative writing and literature are used to study students’ memories of their early animal contacts. Close reading with the examples from the studies of literary arts and memory work to illuminate, how animal theme and bibliotherapy approach are used in this project. Based on the notions of higher education students writing their memory-work related to animals and animal representations in literature, there is a consideration of the value of consciousness in animal geographies as becoming a teacher, also considerations towards post-human education. Students may create consciousness of the value of animal geographies and literary arts in education, and thus, move towards post human, and to develop different ways of caring and well being, to ethics and education that also encompasses the non-humans.
Visualizing Literary and Film Landscapes with Geospatial Mapping View Digital Media
Poster Session Cameron Flynn
This poster presents a new digital tool for visualizing literary landscapes. GeoPandas is an open source programming library that allows the user to easily process and visualize geospatial data. Using the Python programming language, the user can import geospatial data from public and governmental sources to create interactive digital maps of varying scales (cities, regions, countries, etc.). Up until now, this tool has been used predominantly by commercial organizations. However, there’s an exciting and untapped potential for this tool in the humanities, and specifically in literary studies. This project uses public geospatial data from L’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) and OpenStreetMaps to create a digital map of Île-de-France. Using this map, we can plot the movement of characters in literature across the physical space of greater Paris. By compiling the spatial data from several different contemporaneous authors such as Hugo, Balzac, and Baudelaire, we can create a “heat map” of the kinds of geographic spaces that characters of nineteenth-century French literature most heavily frequented. A similar analysis can be done for the Nouvelle Vague using locations from the films of Godard, Truffaut, and Varda. This kind of visual analysis can make research in literary and film studies much more accessible to researchers from across other fields. Additionally, it can open up exciting new opportunities for interdisciplinary research with scholars in City and Urban Planning, for example, to see how cultural productions such as literary texts make use of and express urban space.
Remain Unchanged: Rethinking the Transformation of “Xian” View Digital Media
Poster Session Lok Yee Lorraine Wong
“Xian” means immortal. It is a concept hand down from ancient times in China. However, the appearance of Xian, the way to become immortal, and the way to visit the fairyland kept changing. This makes Xian become an unsteadfast concept. Human desires remain unchanged under this variable concept as people initially long for happiness and longevity. Etymology and close reading methods have been applied to analyse the unsteadfast idea of Xian. The meaning of Xian, the appearance of Xian and the way of practising asceticism will be touched on in the poster and exhibit how the concept of Xian is being disguised in history. Aiming to magnify the primary motivation of becoming immortal is staying unchanged.
